This article* examines the extent to
which Green parties can be considered social-democratic formations. The
Australian Greens, since 2010 in de facto governmental coalition with the Labor
Party, are posited as an important case study of the global Green party
movement. The Australian Greens have generally been seen as a far-left party,
as expressing the views of the new social movements or as a site of tension
between these two tendencies.

It is argued here that there are, however, important
connections between the Greens and traditional social democracy, explored through:
the
response of the Greens to the signing of the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement
and the Iraq war, analysed in relation to left nationalist themes; related
comments from focus groups with Greens branch members; and data from the 2007
Australian Election Study, used to compare the social composition and attitudes
of those voting for the Greens, the Labor and conservative Liberal
Party-National Party coalition [Coalition].

It
is found that Greens’ discourse is often framed by
left nationalism. In social composition Greens voters are considerably
closer to Labor voters than to Coalition supporters, although with a higher
proportion of business owners, a generally higher educational level and a
slightly smaller proportion of union members compared with Labor voters. Greens
score on average slightly lower than Labor voters on a pro-union attitudinal
scale, but slightly higher on an anti-capitalist scale and considerably higher
on an environmentalist consciousness scale and self-identify as more leftist
than Labor voters.

It
is argued from this evidence that an important basis of Green politics is an
interaction between rising ecological consciousness and the development of a
highly educated stratum of the contemporary labour aristocracy. Understanding
the Greens as, to a large extent, a specific form of social democracy helps us
understand that many of the contradictions of their further development will
take the form of left-right conflicts rather the oft-posited “left Greens”
versus “green Greens” contradiction.

Introduction

The
Green parties around the globe are an important expression of ecological
politics today. The Australian Greens grew out of the world’s first green
party, the United Tasmania Group, formed by Tasmanian environmentalists in 1972
(Australian Greens 2011). They are an
increasingly successful national party in the global Green current, growing
substantially in the last decade: their national Senate vote has risen from
4.9% in 2001 to 12.8% in 2010 (Australian Electoral Commission 2001 and 2010),
and reportedly their membership has increased from 1538 in financial year
1998-99 to 10,429 in 2009-10 (Willingham 2011).
After the 2010 federal elections, their representation includes 22 members of
state parliaments, more than 100 local councillors and a member of the House of
Representatives, the federal lower house, elected for the first time at a
general election. Since this election they have had nine federal senators (up
from the previous five) and a balance of power in the Senate, the federal upper
house, able to give or deny the Labor government a majority there against the
official opposition, the conservative Coalition that consists of the mainly
urban Liberal Party and the mainly rural National Party.[1]

Like
its sister parties that have arisen across the world since the 1980s, the
Greens proclaim four “core beliefs”: peace and non-violence, grassroots democracy,
social and economic justice, and environmental sustainability (Australian Greens 2011). These principles
suggest antecedents both in traditional leftist concerns with equality,
solidarity and radical democracy and in newer movements for disarmament and
environmental protection. Much past commentary on the Greens has argued that
these parties represent either a fundamentally new form of politics, or a
contemporary expression of the socialist or far left. The academic literature
often holds that the Green parties are uncomfortable meeting places, if not
sites of struggle, between ecologist/new movement and socialist wings.

Contrary
to these views, in this article I argue, using the Australian Greens as a case
study, that contemporary Green parties can be understood to a considerable
extent as contemporary expressions of the traditions of social democracy and
Laborism. While Marxist and other far-left traditions have also had some impact
on the Greens, as clearly have newer movements, I feel that the focus of this
paper is an important and under-researched aspect of Green politics.

The gains of the
Greens at the last Australian federal election have given the party a new
weight and role in national politics that warrants new attention
internationally. Scott (2011) discusses
how following the October 2010 federal election the Australian Labor Party (ALP)
was able to form government, even with a minority on the floor of the lower
house and the same number of seats therein (73) as the Coalition, by forming
agreements with the single lower-house Green MP and three independent MPs. One
of the latter is former Green and two are progressive-minded rural
independents. With the Greens’ support Labor can also have legislation
confirmed by the upper house. Scott (2011) calls this a “small c coalition on
the left of centre” (p. 4) and relates this development to polling figures from
2007 (when Labor came into office after 11 years of Coalition government) to
2011, which show a steady fall in Labor support and a steady increase in Greens
support. Labor has been pushed somewhat to the left, Scott (2011) argues, in
areas such as increased support for higher education and in the introduction of
a carbon tax.

Scott (2011) further
argues that these developments are of significance globally in comparison with
European experiences of the Greens in government, such as the German red-green
government of 1998-2005, which he contends will be an increasing international
trend also evidenced by recent gains by the Greens in Laender (state) elections.

Through most of the
party’s existence there seems to have been two broad interpretations of the Australian
Greens. Those antithetical to the party, at least those from the right or those
who see conservation as somehow above politics, tend to see the Greens as
basically a continuation of the Marxist or far left, in devious
pseudo-environmentalist disguise.

Larry Anderson, a
former MP of the rural-conservative National Party, stated during the 2004
federal election campaign that, “This idea that they are some warm, nice midway
house between the coalition and the Labor Party overlooks the fact that
actually they are a home for people who in the 1950s would have joined the
Communist Party… They are watermelons, many of them — green on the outside and
very, very, very red on the inside” (Blenkin 2004).
In the lead up to the 2010 federal poll conservative Catholic Archbishop of
Sydney George Pell claimed “one wing of the Greens are like watermelons”,
including former “Stalinists”, and that the part was fundamentally un-Christian
in its opposition to religious schools and support for abortion, euthanasia and
equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians (Pell
2010). Pell (2011) has repeated
his suggestion of a hijacking of ecology by radical political forces in his
attack on those who argue that the evidence for human-induced climate change is
settled as “deep greens” who are “totalitarian … zealots”.

Sloan and Lines
(2003) argue that the Greens no longer speak for
conservation in Australia, because of their increasingly left-wing pose.

Those
more favourable to the party, including the views expressed in most of the
small number of academic articles published in Australia on the subject, stress
the radical newness of the Greens. Turnball and Vromen (2006) see “post-materialist values” and the radical democratic
practice of newer social movements as characteristic of the Greens. Similarly
Miragliotta (2006), while seeing the
Greens as to some extent a pragmatic adaptation by social movement actors to
electoral realities, argues that the Greens represent a new radical politics on
three counts. First, in their rejection “of both capitalism and communism”,
rejecting materialism generally in favour of an ecological consciousness.
Second, in their policy stances, at odds with the major parties in relation to
opposition to free trade and uranium mining, and support for economic
self-reliance and greatly improved public education and health. Third, in
espousing participatory party democracy in contrast to traditional party
elitism.

Theorists
have for some time argued that political forces with an environmental focus are
in fact bound to contain elements both of the extant far left and of radically
new social movements, sometimes seen in tension. Dobson (2000) contrasts “ecologists” to “ecosocialists” or “ecological
Marxists”, in that despite commonalities the former fundamentally see
industrial society as the problem, while the latter maintain a focus on
capitalism. Eckersley (1992) too sees
common ground but also a tension between ecosocialist and “ecocentric” visions
of a Green politics. In his view, ecosocialists are not sufficiently attuned to
what is “distinctive” in “Green thought” because, while they may question the
“cornucopian” assumptions of modern political thought, they do not question its
“anthropocentric” assumptions (p. 120), a necessary questioning which he sees
as a distinct moral standpoint (p. 40).

In
a somewhat similar vein Hutton and Connors (2004) see tensions within the
Australian Greens as relating to explicitly moral approaches to politics, if in
this case regarding social and economic questions. They see the party as a
coalition of “left Greens” who subscribe to a class-based “ideological
commitment to redistribution” and “green Greens” who have a “moral commitment
to social justice” (p. 36). While this
distinction is possibly valid, I do not think it is so sharp in regard to
social-democratic as opposed to Marxist and other far-left influences upon the
Greens. In terms of historical antecedents, representations of capitalism or
neo-liberalism as morally degrading, and socialism or social justice as morally
uplifting, are long-running themes in British and Australian social democracy.

We
can see these ideas in the work of self-proclaimed Christian socialist and
British Labour leader Richard Tawney (1964)[2],
and in the essays of recent Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, a self-proclaimed
Christian social democrat (Rudd 2006a, 2006b).
In terms of recent practice, Hutton and Connors exemplify their distinction by
pointing to Greens’ leader Bob Brown’s consideration in 2002 of support for the
privatisation of the then public telecommunications provider Telstra in return
for forest protection, seen as a moral imperative. They rightly point out that
such a deal would have been anathema to left social democrats or Marxists, and
argue that Brown, in changing his view and deciding to clearly oppose the then
Coalition government’s privatisation plans, must have been pressured by left
Greens.

While
Brown’s initial approach, prioritising trees over public ownership, may be
literally “ecocentric”, Hutton and Connors perhaps do not emphasise enough that
in this affair the weight of party opinion apparently overruled the
acknowledged leader. Brown’s initial position might also be construed as a
pragmatic compromise typical of social-democratic politics. In any case, it is shown
below that at least some of Brown’s more recent positions appear informed by
left social-democratic tradition and do not have any obvious connection to
radically new, ecocentric approaches.

Through
2010, as the Greens entered a governing coalition in the state of Tasmania with
Labor in March 2010 and appeared to be heading towards Senate balance of power
and lower-house representation in Canberra (as they did in October of that
year), a conception of the Greens as having something to do with traditional
social democracy became evident in media discourse.

Before
the Tasmanian coalition deal was signed, Richard Flanagan, a well-known
Tasmanian author, argued that the former Labor state government of Premier Jim
Bacon had slavishly acceded to the demands of the forestry industry while
attacking the Greens, and thus had “ceased to become a force for any
progressive politics”. He saw this as the reason that blue-collar as well as
“middle-class” Labor supporters were defecting to the Greens, and that the
salvation of progressive politics lay in a Green-Labor governmental agreement
in Tasmania and a general united front nationally (Flanagan 2010).

The
social-democratic nature of the Greens was expressed, in a negative way, by
Passant (2010), who pointed to the
history of co-option and betrayal associated with reformist socialism. Hartcher
(2010) argued against the “watermelon”
metaphor by pointing to Bob Brown’s clear advocacy, at a pre-election National
Press Club address, of “old Labor redistributive socialism”, with measures such
as higher taxes on the wealthy and big mining companies, and permanent public
ownership of a national broadband network. The Greens are “actually more like a
tomato, red not just on the outside but all the way to the centre”.

Charnock
(2009) provides analytic rigor for a conception of the Greens as substantially
influenced by social democracy by arguing that the party is “part of a
left-wing bloc” (2009, p. 245). The
notion of a bloc suggests a spectrum of leftist views with important
commonalities, if not necessarily without contestation and contradiction,
rather than sharply distinct “socialist and environmentalist wings” within the
party or its support base. Charnock supports this argument by showing the
correlations among voters between supposed “post-materialist” values and
traditional leftist concerns, the strongly leftist self-identification of
Greens candidates and the strong perception of the Greens as leftist by voters.
In this article I seek to extend and broaden Charnock’s contribution by showing
the connections between the Greens and Australian Laborism and social democracy
more explicitly.

My
overall approach here is a “triangulated” one, that is, one combining
qualitative and quantitative data and analyses. Such an approach is
particularly useful when examining different aspects of a complex social
phenomenon (Bryman 2004, pp. 451-465),
relevant here as I argue that the nature of the Greens can be best examined
through the varied angles of its public positions, the views of branch-level
activists and the nature of its voter base. I thus examine the nature of the
Greens, particularly with respect to the traditional political and social bases
of social democracy, through three sets of evidence. First, I explore the
extent to which the public response of the Greens to two controversies of the
past decade, the signing of the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA) and
the march to war in Iraq, were framed by left Laborite traditions of, respectively,
economic nationalism and a conception of Australia as politically dependent
upon imperial power.

Second,
I analyse comments on related issues from focus group discussions with Greens
members, conducted for my doctoral research on national identity and leftist
politics.[3]
The general method followed in analysing both my documentary and focus group
data is what Bloor and colleagues (2001)
term “logical analysis”, in which the logic of writers’ and participants’
arguments are reconstructed and their premises teased out and related,
particularly in this case in regard to historical antecedents.

Third,
I analyse data from the 2007 Australian Election Study to compare the social
composition of Greens, Labor and Coalition voters and also the attitudes of
supporters of the three party blocs to questions directly related to class and
to environmentalism.

Left
nationalism and the Greens

If, as I contend, the
Australian Greens have strong roots in social democracy then we should be able
to discern aspects of the traditions and history of the Australian Labor Party
(ALP), including its contradictions, within the discourse and practice of the
Greens. The ALP has always been and remains a contradictory formation, with a
working-class base and dominant, if sometimes contested, pro-capitalist
leadership and approach (Bramble and Kuhn 2009).
An important expression of the contradictions of Laborism, and the aspect
focused on here, is its attachment to a specific form of nationalism, or
perhaps more accurately a related set of nationalisms.

Laborism has
traditionally been concerned with a self-reliant and independent Australia. As
Hobsbawn has argued, left-wing forms of nationalism have had significant
impacts in countries with strong working-class
movements since the latter part of the 19th century. Democratisation gave the
working masses an identification with, and at least some real stake in, the
consolidating nation-states, to the extent that struggles for democracy and
justice were generally seen in terms of changes to the existing state and
involving all classes that made up the nation. There was however a
contradiction between the broadening of nationalism and its fundamentally
bourgeois nature:

What made this populist-democratic and Jacobin
patriotism extremely vulnerable, was the subalternity, both objective and —
among the working classes — subjective, of these citizen masses. For in the
states in which it developed, the political agenda of patriotism was formulated
by governments and ruling classes.(Hobsbawm 1990, p. 89)

Left economic nationalism

A key
aspect of contradictory leftist nationalisms has been populist, rather than
consistently class-based, conceptions of socioeconomic structure and
alternative economic strategies. Populist-nationalist ideology has often been
explicitly counterposed to more class-based and internationalist ideas, not
least in early struggles over the nature of the ALP. Class analysis takes
Australia as a capitalist social formation dominated by a national bourgeoisie
that owns and controls the means of production and exploits the working, small
business and farmer classes. Advocates of nationalist and populist views,
particularly those that have any connection with or who avow sympathy for the
left or the labour movement, may take on elements of class analysis. But such
views stress a cleavage between “the people” or “the nation” and parasitic
groupings, often constructed as alien to the nation, based on particular
economic sectors and, generally, foreign capital. Strategies tend to focus on
protection of and assistance to “our” industry and enterprise through exchange
controls, tariffs, quotas and subsidies.[4]

For example, from early in the
history of the labour movement, a central part of the populist-na­tionalist
nexus between foreigness and parasitism was a critique of banking capital as
the “money power”.[5]
The merging by the early 20th century of banking and indus­trial firms into
finance capital was misconstrued as the domination of parasitic money changers,
many of whom were British, over productive layers of society. This critique at
times had anti-Semitic overtones, as in the title of a seminal text, Frank
Anstey’s The Kingdom of Shylock (Anstey
1917), and a 1930 labour press cartoon showing Otto Niemeyer, sent by
the British Reserve bank to enforce austerity measures on Australian
governments, as a caricatured Jewish-Asiatic octopus devouring Australia (The
Worker,
Brisbane, August 27, 1930, reproduced in Alomes and Jones, 1990, p. 207). The latter appeared at a time when anti-bank feeling
was being forcibly expressed by New South Wales Labor premier Jack Lang, who
railed against “foreign bankers” and “financial imperialists” and attempted to
repudiate some debts and lower interest payments before his heroic stature was
con­firmed by his dismissal by the NSW governor (West,
Holmes and Adler 1979, p. 29).[6]

The long-term pursuit by Prime
Minister John Howard’s Coalition government of an Australia-US Free Trade
Agreement (AUSFTA), eventually signed in 2004, provoked considerable controversy
and a widespread campaign of opposition that included Greens leaders and
activists (Ranald 2006), and the issues
it sharply raised provides an ideal recent case study in how different
political forces address economics and trade.

Conceptions of Australia as exploited
and in need of independence were to the fore among those who campaigned against
the agreement. The discourse of the Greens was of a piece with that of the
mainstream of the labour movement and most other campaigners. The trade union
covering media and cultural workers posited the US and Australia as seemingly
different social systems with different goals: “For the US, these negotiations
are all about business. For Australia, the issue is one of national sovereignty
and the right to foster cultural expression” (Media
Entertainment and Arts Alliance 2003). For the Australian Manufacturing
Workers Union (2003), the issues could be
summed up by the slogans, “Maintain Australia’s economic and cultural
independence” and “Australia must not become the 51st state of America”.Similarly, a Greens leaflet demanded,
“Australia is not the 51st state! Back off! Australia is not for sale!” (Australian Greens 2003). The campaign’s
umbrella coalition, the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (2003), fought the agreement under the slogan,
“Don’t trade Australia away”, and a logo of a stylised Australia coloured in
with a US flag inside a crossed out circle.

For his part, Bob Brown declared that the Howard government’s
threat to recall parliament if the US congress did not approve of Australian
legislation enabling the AUSFTA was a “a new low in
subservience to the Bush Administration”, and hoped that Congress did indeed
reject the AUSFTA as then “Australia can get back to running its democracy
without waiting on America’s say so” (Brown
2004). Then-Greens senator Kerry Nettle echoed such representations of
the conflicts over the agreement as consisting of the contradiction between the
national interests of Australia and those of the United States. She argued that the agreement “was not in Australia’s best
interests” and would “give US corporations greater control of Australia’s
medicines, quarantine laws, manufacturing, agriculture and cultural industries”
(Daily Telegraph, April 20, 2004,12).

Within
both the Greens branches I conducted focus group discussions with in 2006 and
2007, asking for general opinions on national identity and political practice,
the AUSFTA and general questions of trade and globalisation were raised.
Comments from one Greens group on the AUSFTA per se reflect a straightforwardly
nationalist, unified “we” conception of trade in which the incompetence of the
Australian trade representatives was a key issue (with these rural Greens
showing a particular antipathy to the rural-conservative National Party), along
with nationalist-inflected suggestions on the weakness of Australia’s economic
position.

Bill: Well it’s free on one
side. America still keep all their internal restrictions and subsidies. So it’s
not a free trade agreement at all.

Roger: We had a couple of donkeys
over there.

Bill: For Christ sakes, we sent
the National Party there.

By
contrast, members of the other Greens group did not raise poor deals for access
to US markets for Australian agricultural products, an absence perhaps related
to their urban location. In discussing trade, this group at several points
raised a conception of Australia as an exploitative country and discussed the
use of “globalisation” and “the national interest” by governments as
ideological myths. For example:

Johan: Now the
national interest, is that the interest of BHP when they go off to South
America or Africa or somewhere and, you know, get copper, lead and zinc out of
the ground for next to nothing?

This
group also debated some subtle differences when discussing the need to reject
the imperative of maximising export profits, specifically a policy of phasing
out coal mining on environmental grounds. Barry, who notes that he came to the
Greens as an environmental activist and only later took up “social issues”,
sees a straightforward matter of replacing export profits and jobs from mining
with those available from tourism.

Barry [public
servant]: Is it in the national interest to support these 20,000 [working in
mining in Queensland], plus the executives, or to say it’s in the national
interest to say no, no, we’ll phase that out in the national interest and
support the 60,000 jobs forever on the Barrier Reef?

Here he
articulates a theme that I found among a number of Greens (Fredman 2009, pp. 288-328) contrasting
long-term, rational, “true” national interests to short-term, profit-driven,
“false” national interests. In response to the above comments Paul, a union
organiser who came to the Greens as representing a “vision of a better society”,
expressed the same policy, but was more concerned with relating to working-class
identity and the need to win over workers.

Paul [union organiser]: … we
have to be very mindful of the fact that coal-mining communities, forestry
communities, they are communities in their own right… My uncle and my grandad
were both miners… To overnight say tomorrow you’re not going to be coal miners
anymore, that’s stripping a person of their entire identity. So the Greens’
policy isn’t about saying tomorrow that’s it we’re not going to be doing any
more coal mining, it’s looking long term in terms of what are we going to be
offering as alternatives.

From this
exchange there appears to be potential differences among these Greens about how
to relate to different layers of workers and how and to what extent the logic
of profitability can be rejected.

Left-nationalist
opposition to war

One of the four key planks of the
global Green party movement is opposition to war, but as in the case of
economics and trade the approaches of the Australian Greens to war should be
seen not so much in terms of recent social movements but in the light of
long-standing labour movement debates. A strong tradition of Australian social
democracy, since the time of the Boer War, has been opposition to engagements
in foreign wars on the basis of the Australian nation’s need to pursue a course
independent of great imperial powers.

For example, as part of the
campaign against conscription in the First World War, the labour
movement news­paper TheWorker argued:

“The whole trend of
Australian policy was to build up a self-reliant nation, capable of its own
defence in case of attack…The theory that Australian defence means the
compulsory deportation of our citizen forces to foreign battlefields is
entirely new” (September
14, 1916, quoted in McKinley, 1990, p. 55).

Left Labor MP Jim Cairns also
reflected this theme in 1965 as the Australian intervention in Vietnam began:

Our failure to achieve a
distinctive Australian outlook is preventing us from solving our Australian
problems. The basic assumption of our “defence” policy, for instance, is that
we cannot solve our military problems: that we must depend on ‘powerful friends.
(Quoted in Kuhn, 1997, p. 167.)

In the
history of the Australian labour movement such left-nationalist approaches to
war and foreign relations, focusing on national unity around independence from
allegedly dominating powers, have been opposed by far-left minorities espousing
anti-imperialism, that is an analysis of Australian capitalism as a willing ally
of bigger imperialist powers, a view of war as an inherent feature of the
contradictions of capitalism and a focus on self-determination for colonised
peoples.

Since the end of the
Second World War, the mainstream centre-left position has moved towards “liberal
internationalism”, which also purports to stand for the self-determination of
nations but within a framework of individual rights and the peaceable global
operation of the rule of law guaranteed by authoritative international bodies (Fredman 2009, pp. 243-252).

In the
lead-up to the Iraq War, Greens leader Bob Brown consistently used left-nationalist
themes on issues of war and security, but also tied these to broader concerns
and understanding than, for example, then Labor leader Simon Crean, whose
discourse was framed in a blandly legalistic version of liberal
internationalism (Fredman 2009, pp. 257-269).
Brown linked Prime Minister John Howard’s closeness to the White House and
concerns about a “democratic deficit” in lack of support for the war, in
stating:

Mr.
Howard has shown he speaks more for the White House than the widely held
feeling in Australia that this is not our war. After the speech [US ambassador]
Tom Schiefer could say ‘he speaks for me’ but millions of Australians will say “he
is not listening, he doesn’t speak for us”. (Brown 2003a)

In a
statement released several days later Brown used the metaphor of US domination
of Australia via telephone:

Prime
Minister Howard’s relaying to Australia of today’s phone call from President
Bush is the worst humiliation so far for the millions of people wanting an
independent voice for the nation on the issue of Iraq… [In deciding on
deployment Howard] simply awaits President Bush’s next phone call.

In this
case Brown rhetorically contrasted subservience to the US with a liberal internationalist
concern with the UN in stating, “Our Prime Minister is not thinking of global
law, the UN Charter, or the options for containing Saddam Hussein so much as
accolades in a post war Rose Garden” (Brown
2003b). On the eve of war Brown’s expression
of left nationalism was significantly different to that of Crean’s (to the
extent that Crean expressed any traditional left nationalism). Brown clearly
linked both an internationalist concern for the Iraqi people and an underlying
economic basis for US intervention to a conception of Australian subservience:

This
morning in Baghdad and Basra millions of innocent Iraqis are huddling in terror
… President George Bush has effectively sent Australia to war … This is an oil
war, this is not Australia’s war.(Brown 2003c)[7]

Yet at
other points in regard to Afghanistan, Brown’s left nationalism has been linked
not to opposition to war from a consistent anti-imperialist position but to an
isolationist stance, of avoiding Australian involvement, in terms that implicitly
accepted key tenets of the “national interest” security and defence agenda and
the necessity of US intervention in that nation. In opposing extra troops being
sent to Afghanistan in early 2006 Brown stated:

This is
the Bush administration’s war and it is up to President Bush to ensure the
security of both countries, not the Australian Defence Forces… Our troops
should be in Australia and our neighbourhood where our national interests are
concentrated. (Brown 2006)

Similarly,
in April 2007 Brown argued:

The 300
[SAS troops being sent to Afghanistan] should remain in our region where
instability is rife and our defence forces are already stretched… The current
Afghanistan mire comes out of the Bush administration’s mistake in withdrawing
from Afghanistan and invading Iraq. It should be President Bush dispatching the
extra contingent to Afghanistan, not Australia.(Brown 2007)

While
opposition to Australian troop deployment has been continually and publicly
advocated by Brown, including an attempt in early 2010 to bring a debate of
withdrawal of Australian troops to the Senate (Brown
2010), the attitude of Brown at least
to the legitimacy of the war as a whole has remained unclear. In any case these
examples, by not making clear whether the war in Afghanistan itself is
justified or not, rather opposing Australian involvement from an isolationist
stance that avoids a more radical and consistent anti-imperialist position,
suggest the contradictions of left nationalism as an alternative to
conservative expressions of national interest and foreign policy.

Similarly,
my focus group participants expressed an amalgam of internationalism and left
nationalism in regard to Iraq, war and security. Representative statements
included:

Tony [regional
Greens]: Bob Brown exemplified our vision for Australia’s national’s interest,
values and national identity when he stood up in the parliament and told George
Bush what for…

Roger [regional
Greens]: Here we are, a little outpost of the American empire, and … at the
bidding of George Bush and his corporate war machine at any time and place … regardless
of whether it’s in our national interest.

An
anti-imperialist understanding of war is alluded to here by reference to its
capitalist or “corporate” nature, while left nationalism is expressed by the
contrast between conservative subservience to the United States to an
independent and authentic expression of Australian-ness exemplified by their
own party.

The social and political nature of Greens voters

In this
section I present analyses of data from the 2007 Australian Election Study
(AES) (Bean et al. 2008) on relevant social attributes and opinions of Greens
voters in comparison to other party blocs.[8]
The object was to investigate to what extent — by social composition, union
membership, attitudes towards class, as well as the environment and
self-identification as being leftist — Greens voters could be considered as being
on the leftist end of a broadly social-democratic bloc that is mainly but not
entirely working class.

I also
show the differences in educational attainments between the voting blocs as
part of my argument about the social nature of the Greens. For these analyses I
use votes in the House of Representatives, assuming this is a measure of a more
committed vote than that for the Senate (as Charnock 2009 notes there has been
for some time a tighter relation between general party identification and lower-house
voting than between such identification and Senate voting).

The
results are presented in charts showing, for each party bloc, relevant
percentages (of class membership and union membership, with percentages
relating to educational attainment presented in a table) or averages (for the
scores on attitudinal scales as explained below). These charts have error bars
representing 95% confidence intervals, that is the range of values for the mean
score or percentage, as relevant, among the sample within which we can be 95%
confident that the actual population value lies. This procedure was considered
the most straightforward way to show the overall trends and differences in the
results while acknowledging margins of error, which are considerable for the
relatively small sample we have in this survey, particularly for Greens and
National Party voters. Note that where there is no overlap in the confidence
intervals we can immediately see that there is a statistically significant
difference results at a 95% level (that is, we can be 95% confident that the
difference found in the sample derives from a difference in the whole
population), but also where there is some overlap there is still the
possibility of a significant difference, which I calculate and report as
appropriate.[9]

I wanted
to first analyse the sample by party and class according to a Marxist
conception of class — as a dynamic field of relationships within a system of
social production consisting under capitalism of a working class constrained to
sell its labour power, a ruling class owning and controlling the means of
production and a variegated middle class with intermediate levels of ownership
and control in the socioeconomic field — rather than the mainstream
sociological passive categorisation of individuals by occupation, status and/or
in­come (Fieldes 2005; Kuhn 2005, 2006). That
is, I wanted to do this to the extent possible with a fixed-response sample
questionnaire, which requires some simplifications and abstractions, even with
a questionnaire that records considerable demographic detail such as the AES. I
first selected out only those in the labour force (leaving a sample size of
1667), and then used questions on position type (upper managerial or not) and
whether the respondent was employed or self-employed to create a class typology
of workers (74.7% of the sample) and two middle-class categories, salaried
upper managers (6.5% of the sample) and business owners (18.8% of the sample).[10] The
validity of this operationalisation of class is well demonstrated below, where
the results indicate associations between social positioning, consciousness and
party affiliation that are highly relevant to the topic at hand. Figure 1 shows
the class composition of each group of lower house voters.

Figure 1: Class composition of each main group of 2007 lower-house
voters,
per cent with 95% confidence intervals.

As we can
see from Figure 1, the general pattern is that the Labor voting base is
considerably more working class, and considerably less managerial or business
owning, than the Coalition base, with the Greens appearing somewhere in between
in terms of workers and business owners. The significant difference between all
class groups among Labor voters and conservative voters (apart from the small
number of National Party upper-managers) is readily apparent. Similarly the
proportion of National Party business owners is clearly higher than that among
Greens, and that of workers lower. Calculations also show that there is a
significantly higher proportion of workers among the Greens voters (76.7%) than
Liberal voters (66.8%), but the apparent difference in this regard between
Green voters and Labor voters (82.3% workers) is not significant. Similarly,
there is a significant difference between the proportion among Greens of upper
managers (3.8%) and that among Liberal voters (9%), while this proportion among
Labor voters (5.2%) is not significantly higher than that of Green voters. In
terms of business owners, the proportion among Greens (19.5%) is significantly
higher than that among Labor voters (12.5%) but not significantly different
from that among Liberal voters (24.2%). Note however that business owners make
up 25.8% of all Coalition voters, and this is significantly higher than the
proportion among Green voters.

Thus a
detailed examination confirms the general picture that the basic class nature
of the Green voter base is quite similar to the Labor voter base, with the
proportion of business owning Greens however between that of Labor and the
Coalition (note there appears to be either a somewhat lower proportion of
workers among the Greens than Labor or that of higher managers, or both, but we
cannot tell from this sample).

The
following two figures and analyses summarise more subjective aspects of class
relations. Figure 2 shows the proportions of party voters who state that they
belong to a trade union.

Figure 2: Union membership by party vote, per cent.

Figure 2
shows a similar pattern to Figure 1: a clearly significant difference in
proportions between Labor voters (33.4% of whom report union membership) and
Coalition voters (among both parties of which 15.7% report union membership),
with the Greens in between but closer to Labor. There is a significant
difference between this proportion among Greens voters (25.6%) and Coalition
voters, and a smaller difference between Green and Labor voters that calculates
to be just significant at the 95% level.[11]

Figure 3
shows relevant attitudes by party vote in terms of three scores that I
calculated, using the numerical coding the questionnaire data file contains for
response categories. Two scales aimed to measure attitudes directly related to
class. I constructed a “pro-union” scale based on responses to the following
two questions, which were coded in a standard Likert 5 point scale (that is,
responses of “strongly agree” are coded as 1, and so on up to responses of
“strongly disagree” being coded as 5):

The trade
unions in this country have too much power.

Still thinking
about WorkChoices[12], how much do you approve or disapprove of these changes?

I also constructed
an “anti-capitalist” scale based on the responses to the following two
questions, which were coded as those above:

Big business in
this country has too much power.

Income and
wealth should be redistributed towards ordinary working people.

Note as I
wanted higher scores (which are actually more disagreement) to be more pro-union
for the first scale I left the scores to the first two questions (put in
anti-union terms) as is, while I reversed the numerical order for the second
set of two questions so that higher scores mean stronger agreement.

A third
scale aimed to measure environmental consciousness and was constructed from
responses to the following questions:

Do
you think Australia should or should not participate in the Kyoto agreement to
reduce global warming?

Do
you think that global warming will pose a serious threat to your way of life in
your lifetime?

How
likely are you to join any environmental groups or movements?

The first two
questions were also in scale of decreasing agreement, and the third question
was coded in decreasing order of willingness to join such a group from “already
a member” to “would never consider joining” (so again the order was reversed so
that higher scores refer to more agreement).

The three
scales were constructed by subjecting the responses to the relevant questions
to factor analysis: that is, a statistical procedure whereby a number of items
such as questionnaire responses are reduced to a smaller number of factors,
within which items correlate relatively highly, and between which items do not
correlate very highly. The purpose is to identify underlying structures, in
this case of attitudes, that are evident in items that we hypothesise are
related before conducting the analysis.[13] The
factor analysis procedure can assign for each factor produced a score for each
respondent, calculated on how high the respondent scores on each item in the
factor. To account for differing measures among variables, these scores are
standardised, that is converted to a scale with a mean of 0 and a standard
deviation of 1 (so that most scores are between -1 and 1). Figure 3 shows the
mean scores for each party group for each of my three “consciousness” factors.

Figure 3: Mean consciousness scales scores by party vote.

Clearly
both Greens and Labor voters are on average considerably more pro-union and
more anti-capitalist than both Liberal and National voters. Further, the
average pro-union score of Labor voters (0.62) was found to be significantly
higher than that of Greens voters (0.49), while the average anti-capitalist
score of Greens voters (0.39) was found to be significantly higher than that of
Labor voters (0.28). Greens voters scored on average considerably more highly
than Labor voters on the environmental consciousness scale (0.71 to 0.31) but
both scored more highly on this scale than Coalition voters.

I also
compared responses by party vote to the AES question asking for the
respondent’s self-identification on a left-right scale, measured from 0 to 9.
The plot of the means is given in Figure 4.

Figure 4: Mean left-right position by party vote.

In this case,
it is readily apparent that Green and Labor voters on average see themselves as
well to the left of the self-positioning of Coalition voters and that Greens
voters on average see themselves to the left of such positioning by Labor
voters, as there are no overlaps in the relevant confidence intervals. The
generally highly leftist identity of Green voters is no doubt related to their
having the highest average anti-capitalist score. These figures,
confirming the leftist nature of Greens voters, complement the findings by
Charnock (2006) referred to above, that Greens candidates strongly
self-identify as leftist and the public generally sees the Greens as the most
leftist parliamentary party.

Finally, I further explored social differences between voters by
examining differences in highest post-school qualification. This seemed best to
view in a table due to the number of qualifications, and the results are shown
in Table 1. I also use this table to indicate the association between education
levels and environmental consciousness, by showing the mean score for this
scale for each education attainment group.

Highest educational
attainment

Education
attainment among each party voting group,
per cent

Mean score
environmental scale

Greens

Labor

Liberal

National

Postgraduate degree
or postgraduate diploma

27.6

12.7

8.4

2.9

0.46

Bachelor degree
(including Honours)

22.0

15.6

14.0

5.9

0.24

Undergraduate diploma

3.9

3.4

6.7

1.5

-0.01

Associate diploma

10.2

9.0

8.8

8.8

-0.06

Trade
qualification

8.7

20.4

20.7

27.9

-0.15

Non-trade
qualification

7.9

11.3

11.8

19.1

-.09

No qualification
since leaving school

19.7

27.3

28.8

33.8

-0.18

Total

100.0

100.0

100.0

100.0

Table 1: Educational attainment by party group, per cent and mean environmental
consciousness score for each educational attainment category.

Calculating
for significant differences I found that a significantly higher proportion of
Greens voters than Labor voters have bachelor or higher degrees, and a
significantly higher proportion of Labor voters compared with Greens voters
have trade qualifications, non-trade qualifications or no post-school
qualifications.

In
general, Greens voters are more highly educated and are less likely to be engaged
in skilled or unskilled blue-collar labour than Labor voters. Also from Table 1
environmental consciousness appears strongly related to educational attainment.
It might appear then, considering Table 1 and Figure 3 together, that the
educational level of Greens voters explains their high environmental consciousness.
However, it should be noted that Liberal voters have a very similar educational
profile to Labor voters but have a considerably lower average environmental
consciousness, and generally higher educational attainment than National voters
but a similar average environmental consciousness. It seems educational
interacts with political outlook generally in relationship to environmental
consciousness.

Conclusions

I have
found that in relation to two sets of issues — trade, globalisation and the
AUSFTA, and the Iraq and Afghan wars and national security — discourse
emanating from Greens branch members and leaders seems mainly framed by a left
nationalism (and to a lesser extent traditional internationalism), recognisable
as quite similar to that of traditional modes of social democracy.

I also found that in
social composition Greens voters are considerably closer to Labor voters than
to Coalition supporters in terms of economic ownership and power, in which
non-upper managerial employees are dominant, although they are generally better
educated than Labor voters and a higher proportion of them are business owners.

A considerably higher
proportion of Greens voters than Coalition voters are union members although
this proportion is slightly lower than that of Labor voters. In terms of
attitudes, Greens voters, apart from their high environmental consciousness,
score slightly lower on average than Labor voters on a pro-union scale, while
scoring slightly higher on an anti-capitalist scale, a result that probably
relates to the finding that Greens voters generally self-identify as more
leftist than Labor voters do.

It should be noted
that while Greens voters seem more likely to be middle class than Labor voters
(in the precise sense of business ownership or considerable power at work), the
preponderance of non-upper managerial employees, the extent of union membership
and the generally pro-union and ant-capitalist attitudes among them casts
considerable doubt on those critics who see the Greens’ base as overwhelmingly
middle class in nature (which for example is part of the highly negative
assessment from a far-left perspective of Hillier 2010 that the Greens are “do not in any sense represent an
alternative to the ALP” for the left).

This all suggests
that while the “newness” of Green parties may well be a real phenomenon to some
extent, the argument that these parties and their supporters are
“post-materialist” and somehow beyond class structures and left-right divisions
is refuted by a whole range of evidence. Further we can see that the politics
of these parties have historical roots in social democracy, and the voters of
these parties can be seen as a more leftist, more anti-capitalist, slightly
less labour movement-oriented and somewhat more middle-class segment of a
broadly social-democratic bloc.

Why has this
particular combination of historically formed politics, social composition and
attitudes coalesced in parties with, at least originally, an ecological focus?
I would argue that the results suggest that the Greens are an expression of an
interaction between a rising consciousness about the ecological crisis and
class-structural change of recent decades. The social change in question, I
would further argue, fundamentally lies not so much a rise of a “new middle
class” but in the way longstanding divisions within the working class have been
recast. The working class
has always had wide variations in skills, education and income, that have
always had contradictory political effects. That is, “upper strata” of the
working class have often been better organised and more advanced politically in
some respects, but also can be elitist and a brake on radicalism. Consider the
sketch of the young Tom Mann (an important radical figure in both the UK and Australia
between the 1880s and 1920s) in the late 19th century presented by Mason:

As a teenager he spends three nights a week
at college, one night at Bible class, one night at a temperance meeting and
Sunday night at church… He became an agitator against alcohol and the eating of
meat. Armed with these principles he moves to London as a skilled engineer,
adding astronomy to his hobbies after getting the job of dissecting a meteorite
for the British museum.

The atmosphere of the engineering factory
then is like the atmosphere of a software company or design studio now – a
world of relaxed innovation and the techie obsessions of meticulous men. Mann
works personally alongside George Westinghouse, the inventor of the hydraulic
brake, and Peter Brotherhood, the inventor of the torpedo engine…

He becomes a minor figure in the socialist
pulpits of the time and graduates to organising marches for the unemployed.
After he recites Shelley’s Rise Like Lions at a demonstration in Trafalgar
Square a riot breaks out. By this time he owns a “fairly good collection of books,
a violin and a telescope.”

Before the dock strike, the British labour
movement was dominated by men like Tom Mann – self-taught, proud of their
skills, more at home with socialist painters and philosophers than with “labour
of a humbler kind.”(Mason 2005, pp.
115-116)

As Mason goes to
discuss, the 1889 London dock strike and the birth of mass industrial unionism
led Mann on a path to revolutionary syndicalism and later to communism. Of
course, as Mason also outlines, most of the “men like Tom Mann” became
mainstays of reformism, with varying degrees of militancy and better or worse
politics. The point being that the working class, while possessing a
fundamental commonality among its members through a compulsion to sell their
labour power and potentially politically united in a militant labour movement,
is generally divided by income, skill, education, moral values and interest in
“middle-class” pursuits like vegetarianism. The political involvements of the
better-educated and skilled sections (often better organised and more politicised,
but often moderate and elitist) have always had varied and generally
contradictory effects.

Viewing the
political involvements of educated white-collar labour as fundamentally “new”,
“middle class” and/or “post-materialist” phenomena underestimate both the
variation within the working class and the extent to which broad socioeconomic
changes have entailed a restructure of this class. Connell and Irving argue
that the proletarianisation of intellectual labour has reproduced old general
patterns in new forms, when discussing the growth of white-collar unionism from
the 1950s:

In some ways, what
was happening here was a revision to a very old pattern, the use of industrial
action by privileged groups in the workforce to maintain their distance and
extend their privileges over other employees. The ‘labour aristocracy’ of the
nineteenth century was reincarnated on a basis, not of traditional manual
skill, but of professional knowledge certified by specialised higher education.(Connell and Irving 1992, p. 203)

While these authors
put the industrial action of intellectual labour in perhaps a too negative way,
the main point to be noted here, for both analysis and political strategy, is
the need to understand both the fundamental unity of and specific divisions
within the contemporary working class. Connell and Irving’s insight appear
relevant to the high educational attainment levels of Greens members, combined
with their generally working-class and pro-union nature.

Apart from the rise
of educated labour, what is also “new” is of course consciousness of the
ecological crisis. Trantor (1996) argues
that the critical thinking allowed by extended post-school education is
associated with higher ecological consciousness. My findings support this, but
also that there is an interaction in this with general political outlook and in
this with class positioning.

An understanding of
the strongly social-democratic nature of the Greens is important because this
will help us understand both how Green parties are likely to continue to
respond in generally progressive and anti-capitalist ways to a range of social
and economic questions, as well as to ecological questions, but also to
understand how conflicts and contradictions within the Greens are likely to
develop. This is not to deny that conflicts between ecosocialist and ecocentric
tendencies may not occur but to contend that, as in the history of social
democracy, conflicts between shades of leftism are increasingly likely, a
contention supported by the nature of recent intra-party disputes.

Before the 2010
federal poll, disagreements were reported among Greens leaders as to the extent
that local branches should decide preference distribution[14],
as opposed to national deals, and to what extent the Greens should push a
formal policy of reduced public funding for elite private schools (Bachelard 2010). The first contentious issue
is relevant to Green claims about a “new” type of party uniquely concerned with
participatory democracy. The second, with NSW upper-house member John Kaye
reportedly advocating firm action to redistribute funding towards public
schools in opposition to Bob Brown’s claims that income from Labor’s proposed
mining rent tax could make this policy irrelevant, suggests, as in the Telstra
privatisation issue, a tension between principled socialist and left social-democratic
positions and a desire by the party’s top leadership for room to maneuvre.

In the foreign policy
sphere, a decision by the New South Wales state branch of the Greens to drop
its support for the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions against
Israel, while maintaining more general support for Palestinian
self-determination, “after a year of ferocious debate”, might also be seen as
an accommodation to more conservative forces (Hinman
2011).

It might be suggested
that the Greens are a political force under construction, with some of the same
historical and social determinants as the ALP but without as yet the same sort
of established institutional constraints. Given the nature of the Greens as
analysed here, those seeking to understand and relate to this still-rising
political current could well keep in mind Raymond Williams’ description of
environmentalism, as quoted by Eckersley (1992, p.
119), as the “strongest organised hesitation before socialism”.

References

Alomes, Stephen, and Catherine Jones. 1991. Australian Nationalism: A Documentary
History. North Ryde: Collins Angus and Robinson.

Scott, Andrew. 2011. The fragmentation of
political parties on the left and the formation of new alignments: comparing
Australia with 'red-Green' coalitions in northern Europe. Paper read at
Australian Political Studies Association conference, September 26–28, at
Canberra.

Sloan, Natalie, and William Lines. 2003.
Party of principle? The Greens and population policy. People and Place 11 (2):16-23.

Tawney, Richard Henry. 1964. Equality. London: Unwin.

Trantor, Bruce. 1996. The social bases of
environmentalism in Australia. Australia
New Zealand Journal of Sociology:61-85.

Turnball, Nick, and Adriadne Vromen. 2006.
The Australian Greens: Party organisation and political processes. Australian Journal of Politics and History
52 (3):455–470.

[3]These consisted of a discussion with a branch located
in a regional town in late 2006 and a discussion with a branch in an inner
suburb of a capital city in early 2007, with a total of 18 participants. I do
not claim such a small sample is formally representative of the views within
the Greens, although I did select geographically and socially contrasting
branch locations to enhance variation. Generally, qualitative methods such as
focus groups do not aim for formal representativeness but can provide rich data
on the subtleties and contradictions of the social construction of meanings
much more than for example fixed response questionnaires can (Burnham et al. 2004, pp. 105-112). The names
of those quoted subsequently have been changed.

[4] The development of economic
nationalism in Australia and how it has framed debates around trade,
globalisation and the Australia US Free Trade Agreement is covered in Fredman (2009, pp. 189-226). This includes evidence
that the agreement was in the interests of and happily supported by Australian
as well as US big capital.

[6]
For a detailed treatment see Love (1984).
A recent echo in popular culture of the iniquities of foreign
money power was the 2001 film, The Bank, in which a US chief executive
led the transformation of a benevolent regional bank into an aggressive global
corporation that ruined the lives of decent and productive Australian farmers
and petty bourgeois.

[8] It was
decided to use the 2007 study, rather than the 2010 election study, which apart from
being more recent has a higher proportion of Greens voters due to the
importance of the former Coalition’s government’s anti-union, anti-worker
WorkChoices campaign that had a prominent role in the 2007 campaign. This
legislation restricted trade union rights such as visits to work sites and
reduced minimum working conditions. Attitudes towards this issue, as discussed
below, was asked about in the 2007 AES, and seem in combination with other
questions to be a relatively direct way to assess attitudes to questions
directly related to class.

[9] Cumming (2009) argues for the use of charts with confidence intervals, as
opposed to more conventional statistical tests, as a straightforward way to
summarise trends, differences and uncertainties. He also point out, as an
alternative to standard statistical tests of difference, that the relevant math
tells us that we can read off from such charts statistical differences between
two sub-samples in regard to both the mean scores each sub-sample has of a
numerical measure and the proportion (i.e. percentage) each sub-sample has of a
category. We can tell a significant difference at the 95% level exists when the
size of the overlap of the two mean or proportion confidence intervals is less
than half of the average size of the two confidence intervals. I have used this
procedure when I report below whether any two means or proportions are
statistically different or not.

[10] One simplification was discounting
those not in the workforce. A second was not differentiating between business
owners, as unfortunately there are no questions on whether the business-owning
respondents employ others and if so how many. Third, was a simplification
involving the need to discount shades and graduations in power at work (part of
an overall simplification of treating class as an individual category rather
than a set of social relations within which some individuals will have
contradictory positions) and the question of what point to define those
employees with managerial power as part of a qualitatively separate class from
the rest of the employed workforce. The AES uses a quite complex typology in
this regard, asking respondents to state whether their work position is best
described as non-supervisory or supervisory or lower, middle or upper-managerial.
I choose to define only the upper managerial employees, 6.5% of the total
workforce and 8% of the employed workforce, as a managerial middle class. Some
might argue that this figure is too low, however including those self-defined
as middle managers gave rise to a figure of 21% of the total workforce and 26%
of the employed workforce, which seemed too large for a managerial class and suggested some inflated
self-perception rather than reality. It also made little or no difference to
the patterns discussed below. The main point in any case being that, as the
analysis that follows shows, in terms of substantial difference in economic
ownership and power Greens voters are quite similar to Labor voters and both
are substantially different to conservative voters.

[11] It calculates such that we can be
95.05% confident that there is a significant difference.

[12] WorkChoices as noted being the former
Coalition government’s anti-union, anti-worker legislation that played a
prominent role in the 2007 election campaign.

[13] I originally had thought that the
four class-related items would all correlate well together, and that a factor
analysis would produce a single score that I could call “pro-working class
consciousness”. A principal component analysis with Oblimin rotation was found
to be the most effective form of factor analysis on the four responses. While
this produced a single factor that explained a reasonable 50% of the variation
in the responses to the four questions, taking the two factors as described explained
a much more respectable 75% of this variation. As we can see from Figures 3 and
4 and following analyses there are some subtle and interesting differences in
these factor scores for each party group. The environmental items were
subjected to a principal component analysis and the factor produced explained a
reasonable 55% of the variation of the variables.

[14] This, in a the preferential voting
system used in Australia, being the advice given by parties to their supporters
about how to direct preferences, which can be a major factor in deciding many
seats.

* * *

PLEASE NOTE: Due to ridiculous levels of spam, comments have been
switched off temporarily. If you would like to leave a comment, please
email your comment direct to Linkssocialism [at] gmail.com and indicate
which article you would like it placed below.